A short Powerpoint slide show emphasized Mark's main message: as database designers and developers, we need to communicate fairly sophisticated concepts and data structures to clients with a wide range of experience and familiarity with database terminology and concepts. Often, our designs are presented as drawings of boxes and circles, lines, arrows and crow's feet- schemas. These are often misnamed as Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), which may or may not be effective at communicating our ideas and describing our plans to the client. Mark pointed out that people usually communicate with sentences that include subjects, objects, nouns, verbs and predicates, and introduced the syntax of FORML (Formal Object Role Modeling Language), which uses natural language-like syntax to describe database structures and data relationships. This format can thus be used to represent complex business rules in a database structure with a language understandable by both the designer and the client.

Of course the grease for this wheel is an application which facilitates development of database projects using the above Object Role Modeling (ORM) methodology. VISIO MODELER, part of the VISIO 2000 Enterprise version (retailing for about $1000) was the tool Mark used for his project. This program combines a drag-and-drop object-oriented visual design surface with more typical schema-type views and English "verbalizations" of database rules and relationships. It is a two-way tool: it can create a conceptual database design from scratch and automatically building the actual physical database from the design documents, and it can also "reverse-engineer" existing database structures to display the relationships and rules already defined. The tool can build or reverse-engineer any ODBC-compliant database type supported by drivers on the user's machine.

Mark managed to demonstrate a simple example included with the VISIO package without resorting to an English textbook or thesaurus, pointing out the database modeling language's equivalent concepts to nouns, verbs, facts and predicates. Next, he demonstrated the program's prowess at understanding and checking database structures, rules and constraints. The program's ability to generate a "verbalization" or plain English sentences describing the selected database structure was impressive and had obvious use in helping communicate with clients. He then showed the diagrams and schemas developed for the real-world air resources board project; these occupied nine pages of diagrams when printed out. Additionally, the program automatically generated more than 300 pages of detailed documentation describing the database design.

While possibly crossing over the line to "overkill" for simpler problems, the value of the ORM methodology and VISIO software in a project the size of the one Mark presented was quite clear and showed the profound economy of using a tool even as expensive as this one in planning, developing and documenting large projects.